Thanks to desirable supportability and scalability of mobile terminals to third party software, many mobile terminal producers have launched mobile terminal application stores, for example, Apple's App Store, Nokia's Ovi Store, Google's Android Market and ChinaMobile's Mobile Market. A research institution reports that from 2008 to nowadays, the operation of application stores on a mobile terminal has become very mature in European developed countries and regions, meanwhile Chinese mobile terminal market is entering a stage of high-speed development. For example, in 2009, about 52% of the Smart Phone users viewed or downloaded and installed application software through Smart Phone application stores. At the end of 2009, there were 35.72 million Smart Phone users. In the next two years, the customer numbers of the mobile terminal application stores will grow fast. It is estimated that the number of customers will reach 66.33 million by 2010 and exceed 100 million by 2011.
In these virtual mobile terminal application stores, the number of applications varies from a few hundreds to more than 100 thousand. This facilitates user's download, installation and use according to his/her own needs at any time and also brings about considerable income for operators and original equipment manufacturers (OEM). However, the classification and sequencing methods of the application stores are relatively fixed currently, for example, classification is made by themes, sports, animations or multimedia and other types, wherein sequencing is done by letter order or degree of popularity in each type. For mobile terminal users, as different users may have different favour, the sequencing by degree of popularity, i.e., TOP ranking, is unable to cover all types in which users are interested. Therefore, on one hand, users spend much time on looking for the applications they like from tens of thousand applications; on the other hand, the operators suffer drain of some potential users and influence to ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).